Totally against this.  Notice that the same people seem perfectly ok with leaving out a socialist, green, libertarian, or any other perspective, as they don't want those perspectives to get equal (any?) time.  

This is hilarious!  Do they expect someone to pay a bunch of hacks to blog for the losing side?  Who is "someone"?  Maybe what we see here is that 31% of the population has absolutely no idea how blogging works...

however coming from a country where the govt is involved in broadcasting, trust me when i say it has a HUGE downside.

I saw this on Slashdot earlier today.  I don't know who even came up with this question and poll, but it goes counter to what the Fairness Doctrine is supposed to be about.

In analog radio broadcast, the stations using any particular frequency must be carefully controlled to avoid interfering with each other's signals.  This meant that we needed a regulatory body to license access to the radio frequency and grant was was effectively a local monopoly of control over that slice of the spectrum

Because private entities were being granted a government-sponsored monopoly over what was considered the public airwaves, regulations were put in place to ensure that those private entities were providing a useful service to the public, and the Fairness Doctrine was among those regulations.

The Internet is nothing like broadcast media.  It is:

• Not local
• Not public (it's an interconnected collection of private networks)
• Not self-interfering

The people supporting this idea need to understand that the Internet is a completely different beast and neither can be nor should be regulated the same way as broadcast media.

Y'know, this isn't really about the fairness doctrine at all, I would suggest. It's about a media that no longer puts as much emphasis on real news, instead just bringing on people who parrot contrasting opinions. There's very little discussion of what is factually correct or covering real problems, only the solutions that are offered.

People don't want both conservative and liberal news, they want objective news and programming that is less angry.

The problem with mandatory balance is that, as another commenter noted above, the idea is driven by the FCC jurisdiction on over-the air  radio frequency bandwidth uses, and that the FCC  issues broadcast licenses. The broadcasters giving offense are Fox cable over against Fox news, one outside regulation and one inside, msnbc over against nbc, same problem, and like that. Not internet.

I may not like what a lot of the posters on talkleft or No quarter say, but they are simply not in the same position as an over the air tv station which monopolizes the available bandwidth  available for use in a particular broadcast area, and carries only one side. The only limit on finding someone neutral or with your views on the internet is literally finding them, because every last view in the world is here somewhere.

The problem with applying it outside that narrow band is that the FCC does not have jurisdiction over cable TV which does not come over the air, and does not have the same kind of jurisdiction over cell phones and all their cousins, because that's a telephone sort of use.